The present invention relates to a warm-up apparatus for a vehicle incorporating a battery which can be charged by an external power supply.
A warm-up control using an electric heater is known as one of controls for improving the starting performance of a vehicle under an extremely low temperature environment. In a hybrid vehicle on which a gasoline engine or a diesel engine is mounted, an approach widely spreads in which an electric heater called an engine block heater is incorporated in an engine block so as to warm up the engine block directly to thereby improve the starting performance of the engine. Additionally, also in an electric vehicle in which no engine is mounted, the performance of a battery decreases as the environmental temperature decreases. To cope with this, it is proposed that the temperature of the battery is raised (that is, the battery is warmed up) by using a battery heater mounted on the periphery or in an interior of the battery (for example, refer to Patent Document 1).
Incidentally, in the electric vehicle and the hybrid vehicle which are described above, the electric heater can be actuated by using electric power of a drive battery. On the other hand, when the drive battery is charged external by making use of household electric power available at midnight in the vehicle owner's household, the electric heater can also be actuated by making use of the external electric power when the vehicle is started in the following morning. Thus, it is considered that the electric power stored in the drive battery is saved by such a control to eventually extend a mileage to be covered by the vehicle.
[Patent Document 1] JP-A-2009-224256